


Running Away

by Rosie_Rues



Category: Diana Wynne Jones - Dogsbody
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:Brown Betty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 19:37:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosie_Rues/pseuds/Rosie_Rues





	Running Away

At university, Kathleen dated a lot of astronomy students. She let them buy her dinner and tell her about their research, incomprehensible numbers spilling out of them. They walked her home under skies smudged orange from the streetlights and kissed her in the shadow of her porch. When they left, she sat by her open window and looked up, wondering why she could never escape the faint certainty that there was somewhere she was _meant_ to be.

She dreamed through her own lectures, half-closing her eyes against blanched-out slide shows and letting the words merge with the light until she imagined Cassiopeia and Andromeda haloed with light as heroes fought before them.

Miss Smith wrote to her every week, long letters in a sloping hand, describing her neighbours' antics with dry wit. She sent photographs of Hero's puppies which Kathleen pinned to the crumbling corkboard above her desk. She wrote back dutifully, pretending everything was wonderful, and knew she was unconvincing.

Every couple of months she got a postcard from Robin, festooned with exotic stamps and soft at the edges from too long in the post. _Is Mum still raging?_ he wrote. _I don't care any more. There's too much to see in the world to stay at home._ There would be a description of a mountain climbed or a jungle braved, full of misspelt superlatives. Always he ended it with _You should have come too._

Three months before she took her finals she met Anthony. He was shy and sweet, until he began to talk about his doctorate, when his eyes lit up and arrogance crept into his voice. On their second date he smuggled her into his lab and let her gaze at Sirius through a telescope that was as big as she was.

She made him dinner, and he confessed that he often forgot to eat. After that she cooked every day, trading him stories about the stars he studied for facts. She proofread his papers, skipping the formulas to focus on the words, seeking certainty. They went to a summer ball together, and she wore a flared dress that sparkled under the disco lights. When the closed heat of the union bar got too much she led him outside, running across the campus on unsteady heel until she found a place where she could see the stars clearly. She let him make love to her there, against the parched summer grass, and pretended to herself that being needed was enough.

In August, he asked her to marry him.

She ran away home to decide.

"Well, do you _want_ to marry him?" Miss Smith asked tartly.

Kathleen busied herself with fussing over the latest puppies, and said, "Everyone expects me to."

"Everyone can go hang," Miss Smith said with a sniff. "What do _you_ want?"

One of the puppies looked just like Leo had, all those years ago, red ears, scrabbling paws and determination to waddle further than all the rest. She had never told Anthony about Leo. She picked the puppy up from where he was tangled in the fringe of the rug, and admitted, "I don't know."

"Then that is your first problem," Miss Smith said. "Solve that and you'll know what to do about that boy of yours."

Kathleen sat up late that night, watching the dogs sleep by the dim light of the streetlights coming through lace curtains. The house was warm, and she couldn't think, so she went out into the tiny garden. She could hear the Saturday night noise of the town in the distance, the heavy drift of music and the blare of sirens. The houses around her were dark, though she could hear laughter slipping out of open windows. The garden was overgrown, which made her feel guilty. She and Robin had tended to it for years, but now bindweed and brambles filled it with shadows.

There were clippers in the shed. The moon was unusually bright. She could start to fix this tonight, no matter that it was just another way to run away. Not quite sure why she was crying, she turned around.

He was standing on the steps, and she realised that it wasn't the moon that lit the garden. It was the silver-green blaze of starlight.

"Leo?" she said, voice faltering, and felt stupid. She knew he was Sirius; looked for him every time the stars shone.

He shot her a glittering stare, and then his expression changed, eyebrows arching in surprise. "Kathleen?" he asked and his voice was both musical and hollow, like something transmitted from far away.

She nodded, pressing her hands against her skirt, suddenly shy.

"You changed!" he said, so indignant and outraged that she laughed before she went stumbling across the garden towards him.

He was solid, though his skin beneath her cheek was cool and stung like static. She clung to him until crackling arms locked across her back and he repeated, still furious, "You changed!"

"I grew up," she said, and felt him release her, stepping back. She was about to protest when she felt the sudden heat rise towards her and realised that he had little patience, even for her. Suddenly defensive, she added, "It's been ten years."

He looked bewildered, and she remembered everything she'd been told about the lifespan of stars, and gentled her voice, "I'm mortal, Leo."

"I don't want you to be," he said, wings flaring with a hiss.

"It's not something I have much choice about," she said, smiling despite herself. Even as a dog, he had been stubborn.

"I have a place for you!" he told her. "I've been _waiting_!"

She could feel his annoyance from here, but for the first time in years, she didn't feel the need to soothe. Instead she crossed her arms and glared back. "I can't just stop being mortal and turn into a star!"

The pout looked ridiculous on an eight-foot, glowing, winged green giant. "I did."

"I don't think it works like that for humans," she said, trying to be gentle. The sudden misery on his face made her feel terrible, far worse than she had felt when stammering excuses at Anthony.

"Fine!" he said, his wings snapping out to their full length. "But I'll still wait!"

He rose in a blaze, and it wasn't until the dazzle faded from her eyes that Kathleen realised that he had offered her the very place she had been pining for.

The next day she turned down Anthony's proposal, cleared out the garden and booked a flight to Jakarta. Six months of wandering later, she met Robin on a beach in Bali. He had changed since she last saw him, even taller and skinnier, tanned and energetic. The permanent edge of worry he had carried around in England had vanished.

On the third day, she said to him, "Are you ever going back?"

He shrugged, raising his face towards the sun. "What's to go back to?"

"Isn't Duffy still begging you to come home?"

He laughed, a little bitter. "Not since I came out. I'm not sure Dad wants me home any more, either."

"You can always come to me," she said, squeezing his knee in awkward sympathy.

He grinned at her. "I would, but part of you is always somewhere else. I'm better off here."

It was true enough to sting, so she said sharply, "Really?"

He spread his arms out, laughing. "That's more like it. I love it here, Kath. I love the sun."

She dug her fingers into the sand by her side, feeling its warmth creep through her hand. "Why?"

He opened his mouth, but then hesitated. At last he said, voice very quiet, "Have you ever had that thing? Where you look at the sun and see someone looking back?"

"Not exactly," Kathleen said, remembering the crackle of starlight in a tangled garden.

"It happens a lot," Robin confessed. "And the strangest thing is that every time it happens I don't find it weird. It's just, like, oh, there he is again, and I carry on. Why isn't it weird, Kath?"

She shrugged not looking at him. "You're a child of Earth. Earth loves the sun, in her way."

"Yeah, maybe" he said. "Kath, do you remember the day Leo died?"

She closed her eyes and pretended she hadn't heard.

*

She went back after a year, and took a post as a Classics teacher in a small private school just outside town. When Basil married a pretty accountant with a throaty laugh, she went to the wedding and lied convincingly when Robin disappeared with the best man, the ever-loyal Clive.

Robin, who was meant to be staying on her sofa, didn't get back until the next afternoon. In apology, he cooked her dinner while she stood on her tiny balcony and watched the stars appear.

He brought her a glass of wine and stood beside her while the warm scent of spices curled out into the night. He smelt of sex and cigarettes, so she breathed in wine to clear her senses.

"What do you look for up there?" he asked.

"Sirius," she said and pointed. "Did you know he's actually two stars? He has a companion, but she's almost hidden by his light."

"That's sad," Robin said.

"She doesn't mind. She knows he'll always orbit her."

He sighed, and then said, "Kath, if we keep running away, one day they won't follow us any more."

*

Miss Smith died in 1989, leaving Kathleen a heartbroken dog and a rundown house. She comforted Hero, fixed the house and cried in private, with the curtains drawn against the watching stars.

She continued to teach, becoming a fixture in the school. After a few years, she found that she no longer needed to be passionate to make her students learn. She settled into a vague routine.

Her accent faded with time, until she only felt Irish on her annual visit to her father's grave. She still mourned him, but the bitter confusion she had once felt had gone. She had long accepted that she would never quite understand the combination of terrorist with loving father.

When Hero died, twenty years after Leo, Kathleen buried her in the back garden. She handed in her resignation, and the school did not protest too much.

On the last day of term, she cleaned out her cupboards and closed up her classroom. She wrote out her will, leaving everything to Robin. She threw out everything perishable in the kitchen, and locked all the windows in the house. At midnight, she went out into the garden, locking the door behind her. She hid the keys under the step, where Robin would look for them.

Standing beside Hero's grave, she whispered, "Earth? Can you help me?"

The sudden wind through the bushes brought her a woodsmoke scent of regret. Earth, she understood, could do nothing.

Next she looked up. The full moon was sailing over the houses, round and bright.

"Moon?" Kathleen whispered.

Moon couldn't help her. She was asking the wrong person.

Sol appeared over her roof at dawn, at once both near and distant. He blazed as bright as Sirius, but was somehow both more comforting and more frightening.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" he asked, anxiety beating down at her.

"Not at all," she said politely. "But I know what I _want_."

He laughed, an exuberant, youthful crackle that made her think of Robin. "You _are_ one of Earth's children, aren't you? I'll tell him you want him, but it might take him a while to get here."

"I'll wait, thank you," Kathleen said, and sat down on her back step.

She was half-asleep when he arrived, her back and bladder aching with discomfort. She knew the moment he arrived, from the sudden prickle in the air and the warmth on her cheeks. He didn't speak, but she could feel him breathing.

"Are you still angry with me?" she asked, without opening her eyes.

"I was never angry with you," he said.

She shook her head and opened her eyes. He was standing over her, wings folded and glow contained. Only the shimmer of the air told her how much effort he was putting into that control. She stood up, stiff from sitting so long, and said, "Don't be silly. You _were_ angry. You were just never much good at staying angry."

"Not with you," he said, watching her with wide, yearning eyes.

She smiled, murmuring, "Sirius."

"You can call me Leo still," he offered, and she thought how extraordinary it was to be standing in her back garden flirting with a bashful star.

"I won't," she said. "I know who you are now. I understand what you were offering. It's impossible, unless-"

"Unless?" he echoed.

"Unless we both want it enough," she said, and stepped forward into the blaze and fury of his embrace.

  



End file.
